Cathal BarryA senior Church official has urged parents with children in Catholic primary schools to ensure that a proposed new curriculum will not encroach on the time allocated to religious education.
Fr Tom Deenihan, who heads the Catholic Primate School Management Association, warned that there had been “some concern” that the proposed new Education about Religion and Beliefs (ERB) and Ethics programme would “compromise the time currently allocated for religious education in Catholic and other denominational schools”.
While acknowledging that the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) have stated that the proposed curriculum is not intended to replace the current religious education curriculum, Fr Deenihan warned it was “important that Boards of Managements of Catholic schools and parents who send their children to such schools engage in the consultation process to ensure that ERB does not, in fact, take some of this time due to an already overloaded primary curriculum”.
Fr Deenihan also pointed out that a new religious education curriculum entitled ‘Grown in Love’ was currently being introduced in primary schools throughout the country.
“This comprehensive curriculum required the current allocation of two and a half hours per week to teach,” he said. Theologian Fr Eamon Conway, who has said it was “bizarre” that a faith-based school would have to offer “what is essentially a secularist understanding of religious faith”, told this newspaper that “the problem is really not with the consent of teaching young people about other religions but with the mythology which is inherently secularist”.
“One has to consider the difficult position a programme like this would put teachers in a Catholic school in, in terms of trying to balance all the competing demands of the timetable.
“It’s hard to see how a programme which takes a secularist approach to faith could be made compatible with the wishes of the patrons,” he said.